All posts tagged: football

For a country with a population of only 340,000 – more or less equal to the London Borough of Ealing – qualifying for this year’s Fifa World Cup was a miracle. It is the smallest-ever country to participate, and in its first match, it managed to hold Argentina to a 1-1 draw. 99.6% of Iceland’s TV viewers tuned in to watch the game, making it the most-viewed sporting event in the country’s history.

“They really are crazy about football,” says Matteo de Mayda, an Italian photographer who travelled to Iceland with journalist Cosimo Bizzarri earlier this year to document the sport in Iceland. “It’s a miracle for them to be at the World Cup, and a miracle to draw against Argentina.”

Earlier this year, Sebastian Gil Miranda won First Place in the Campaign category at the Sony World Photography Awards 2015 for his project Shoot Ball, Not Gun. The documentary project took place on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where he visited one of the most dangerous slums in Argentina where two rival gangs violently struggle for turf and power. Focusing on the town’s children, he photographed them playing football within the courtyard of the Chapel Our Lady of Luján. The children, for whom hearing indiscriminate gunshots at night is common place, are connected to these gangs, with fathers, brothers and family friends caught up in the bloodshed. With entries to the 2016 edition of the Sony World Photography Awards closing soon, we caught up with Miranda to discuss the project. What’s the genesis of the project? Usually I work helping NGOs and social foundations. In this case, I knew that Uniendo Caminos, a foundation dedicated to educational support for children in various slums of Buenos Aires, needed content to offer workshops in a centre that …